I just installed iOS 6 and made a beeline for the Maps app. Um. That was pretty much my first thought: um. The reason being, I went for my house and found a pixelated mess in place of what was once a slightly dated satellite map of my garden. Naturally, this is presumably because the UK is in fact ‘London’, but I don’t live in that bit. (Comically, photos of where I live are so bad in the new Maps that you can’t even make out major roads when you zoom out quite a lot.) Of course, on visiting a few random US postcodes, overhead shots at the same zoom level were spiffy. In the UK, things went from OK to London to black and white to London. In addition, the lack of Street View renders Maps less useful for working at countering my astonishing ability to get lost absolutely anywhere by checking out what a street or building looks like before I set off.

I don’t doubt Maps will improve, but it’ll be interesting to see what comes next. Has Google got its own app in the works, ready for release at a time when lots of iOS users are grumbling? I suspect Google Maps for iOS would go down brilliantly right about now, in part because most people think CHANGE IS BAD, but also because quite a few of the changes in Maps actually are bad. (Depending on your location, the app is either a minor feature downgrade or a massive shift to a relatively tiny amount of information.) Another option would be to leave Apple users in the lurch, not bother with Maps for iOS for months, and point to Android as being the best for that kind of thing.

A sensible Google would take the first option, given that Apple’s app will improve, and also that few people will ditch a platform just because Maps became a bit crap. But whether Google’s got its sensible hat on today is something only Google itself knows.

Marco Arment responds to an article on TUAW by Richard Gaywood. Gaywood asks:

How many of you cruise AppShopper’s price drops page for bargains when looking for a new game to while away a boring commute? Or how many of you, when someone recommends an iOS app to you, find the first thing you do is load the AppShopper app to check the “price history” section… and if the app routinely goes on sale for less than it costs now, add it to your wishlist to buy the next time it’s cheap?

And Arment wonders whether:

a nontrivial number of people really go through all of this trouble to save an occasional dollar on apps for their hundreds-of-dollars iOS devices?

I’d assume that most people who are that price-sensitive wouldn’t be in the market for paid apps at all. But I think the numbers prove that theory wrong.

Part of the problem with the race to the bottom in apps isn’t that people won’t buy them, but that they have an odd idea about value for money. I’ve lost count of the number of game devs who say people have a go at them when they’ve the audacity to price their apps above tier-one. After all, games should cost 69p/$0.99, for some reason. And often I’ll be rummaging around the App Store and see some dolt slam a fantastic game because it costs £1.49. Don’t get them wrong—they enjoyed the game. But it should have been 69p, just because.

That said, I’ll admit now to doing one of the things Gaywood mentioned. I have an AppShopper wish-list, which is full of apps that I’d be keen on buying if they were cheaper, even if they’re already cheap. For me, though, this isn’t so much about being a skinflint, more about creating a storage repository for games and apps I’m mildly sort-of interested in. Apps I care about or that look really interesting are ones I buy immediately, regardless of price. After all, with a few exceptions, iOS apps still usually cost a fraction of the price I was paying for games in 1986, or shareware apps I was buying in the late 1990s.

I last year wrote about Vue Cinemas and its interesting perception of the ‘value’ bit in ‘value meal’. Vue wasn’t (and isn’t) alone in gouging customers, matching ever-increasing ticket prices with astonishingly marked up snacks and drinks. At our local Vue, the cost of a drink and popcorn ‘meal’ is about the same as a ticket; worse, it’s about the same as a proper meal at one of the many nearby restaurants.

On the BBC today, in an article about surprising charges, Vue makes a suitably surprising statement:

Vue Cinemas, where a regular popcorn and soft drink costs £8.25, say food and drink is an optional extra and customers are free to take their own snacks in.

On Twitter, @immobiliser than asked the official Vue account if this statement was correct:

Are we indeed free to take in our own supplies for a film?

Vue’s response:

It is indeed within reason. We don’t allow hot or smelly food, so leave your tuna sandwiches at home 😀

If this is the case, great. No hot/smelly food is a perfectly reasonable restriction, but there’s an ‘if’ here, summed up nicely by Andy White’s comments to me, also on Twitter:

Didn’t work for us! Our [k]ids are coeliacs and we tried taking in special food for them – were told no entry unless binned!

He stated this happened at Vue’s fairly new Camberley branch, and his family were “pretty upset about it at the time”. Elsewhere, Stuart Alexander Arnott said to me on Facebook that a BBC report found cinema terms and conditions effectively enable staff to block you taking in your own food whenever they like. His reading of the rules:

I think the cinemas don’t enforce it much, but they’re happy that people think you’re not allowed (according to the show 67% of people think this).

I’ve asked Vue for clarification on its recent statement, asking whether this is company policy or down to each individual cinema, and I will update this post should I get a response.

UPDATE: No response directly from Vue as yet, but the company responded to White on Twitter and since sent an email, which he forwarded to me. It notes high prices are the result of a need to have a viable business model, since much box office money goes to distributors; however, it importantly confirms:

Please note that you are able to bring your own food and drink into the cinema rather than purchasing from our confectionary stands. This is with the exception of hot food or alcohol.

Apple’s issued an invitation regarding its September 12 announcement.

Although it’s possible Apple could throw a curveball and not call its next iPhone the iPhone 5, that would be curious when taking this invite into account. There had been speculation with the iPad dropping a number (simply being dubbed ‘the new iPad’), the iPhone would follow suit. This doesn’t appear to be the case, which suggests two things.

First, the iPhone still requires clear sales differentiation in terms of device naming, meaning at least two other numbered models will remain on sale. Given that iOS 6 works (in a feature-limited fashion) on the iPhone 3GS, it’s possible Apple’s line-up next week will include the iPhone 5, iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 3GS. Fast forward a couple of years and dropping the number would leave you with the iPhone, the iPhone and the iPhone, and all kinds of sales problems.

Secondly, the iPad road-map apparently does not need sales differentiation in terms of device naming. This suggests the iPad 2 remaining on sale is short-term plugging of a low(ish)-end price-point hole. Although I still struggle to see the point of a 7-inch iPad, I now reckon there’s a good chance we’ll see such a model this year or early next year, and older models of the iPad will be removed from the channel as new ones appear, rather more like the iPod touch or Apple’s laptops/desktops than the iPhone.

In case you’d not noticed, Twitter’s management are being jerks. New API rules have brought in arbitrary caps for third-party clients, and this has already impacted on Tapbots, who had to pull the Tweetbot for OS X alpha. Elsewhere, Twitter no longer reveals what client someone is using to post. These things are linked to Twitter no longer wanting competing clients at all. Instead, it wants smaller apps linking in to its system, in order to boost ‘social CRM’, ‘social analytics’ and ‘social influence ranking’. So-called ‘traditional Twitter clients’ are out as the company seeks to remove from the equation apps that ‘engage with the consumer’; instead, devs should ‘engage with business’, or provide business/consumer analytics. In other words, in order to control the Twitter experience and finally make some money, Twitter needs to run everything through its own clients, rather than enabling the third parties that created the service to flourish to also flourish, despite many of them defining Twitter standards—something Twitter itself didn’t do until surprisingly late on.

Right now, Twitter’s playing a cruel game—a death by a thousand cuts. Developer David Smith earlier today said we should “be considerate of 3rd party twitter developers by revoking access from apps you never intend to use,” thereby enabling them to claw back some room in their arbitrary Twitter cap. While it’s a nice sentiment, it starkly showcases the absurdity of the situation—users should not have to revoke app access, in order to enable an app to continue through people gaining access to unused slots. Most users won’t even know how to revoke an app’s access anyway.

It’s clear why Twitter’s taking this path, though: it’s relatively low-risk, spreading out the fallout over a long period of time where people are also hoping things will change. By the time Twitter does pull the ‘no third-party clients’ switch, it will undoubtedly issue a press release stating that only a very small number of people use them anyway, neglecting to mention those who’ve left the service because of being squeezed out, or those ‘forced’ to switch because yet another of the dwindling number of alternative clients by that point had been effectively killed by Twitter’s own rules.

I’d like to propose Twitter therefore at least be honest about the future.

At the end of June, we reported about how we’re working to deliver a consistent Twitter experience, and how we would introduce stricter guidelines about how the Twitter API is used. In order to achieve this and roll out all the exciting features we’re planning, we are going to transition our users entirely to our own Twitter clients.

On March 31, 2013, traditional third-party Twitter clients will no longer have access to the API. In order to facilitate the transition and ensure a consistent experience for our users, we will on or before January 31, 2013 be rolling out new Twitter clients for iOS, Android, OS X, Windows, Linux, Windows Phone and BlackBerry. We realise that client developers have made a huge impact on the service, and we’d like to thank them for their efforts, but we now have to move on and do what’s best for Twitter, thereby ensuring the service’s long-term future.

Brutal? Perhaps. Likely to piss off a bunch of people? Undoubtedly. But at least it’s honest and doesn’t leave people hanging on, hoping for a future that will never come.